Radio Poet

Anyway, I should do a sort of review-ish type thing about the Retekess V115P, which I got in order to more easily record the weather forecasts. So far, I like it. On the V115, the comic sans greeting was, I don't know, charming? No comic sans on V115P, though. No, folks, the V115P is ALL BUSINESS

I can easily look up NOAA all hazard station frequencies. I don't have a list of numbers I can dial to get error messages, however, hah. Not without dialing a lot of working numbers randomly, which I'm absolutely not going to do. So, there's my next puzzle to solve.

Working on a series of audio erasure poems using recordings of NOAA all hazards stations I made as I traveled this year. Next up, to fit with the phone phreaking poems, I'd like to do audio erasures of phone error messages (as in "The number you have dialed is no longer in service....") The snag?

I'm hoping in the "order of things" pedagogy, somewhere between "right hand technique" and "left hand technique" is "don't run your instrument into anything technique" 🤣

Adventures in bass playing: can confirm that learning a large instrument apparently has not improved my proprioception. Or lack thereof. Yet, anyway. >bang<

I'm curious what y'all think about this aspect of AI-generated content. How do we ensure that not only the complexity of art itself is maintained in a time of unchecked AI, but the works made in reaction to it are as deeply felt and considered as their subjects? 9/9

And if we don't find ourselves seeking out that visceral experience in poetry--or any art--what's the purpose? 8/n

We do need to understand the words and how they interact in poems--of course, we do. But if all that is privileged is a lot of clever words, poems become stale puzzles, ones we glance at briefly--if at all--in a moment of distracting ourselves. Ones we don't return to. 7/n

My favorite poets are the ones that leave me gasping for air between stanzas. Whose phrases I can feel as strongly as I hear them. Whose words are just an entryway into the experience of reading their poems.

And?

I don't know what AI-generated criticism will do to that level in poems. 6/n

The pace of the poem through line lengths, the breaks that lead the reader to expectations that are subverted in the next lines, sounds that feel a certain way in the ear--what of all that? 5/n

I also worry about arts criticism that will miss entire layers of what arts are meant to do. As a poet, yes, I put words with meanings together. But if that's all a critic looks at, then the critic misses out on the visceral experience I'm trying to evoke in my readers. 4/n

There's the worry that AI will make art homogeneous by training on what exists already, creating more using that as a pattern, and then pushing that back into the larger body of work. And that's better covered elsewhere. (Also, I wrote an entire poetry collection on that, which is out soon.) 3/n

I'm sure AI can do the job of placing a piece into historical context, which is important. And it can tell you all the possible meanings of individual words. But that risks missing so much about why we come to arts. 2/n

AI-generated arts criticism: a thread.

So one thing about AI-generated content that I fear as a poet (alongside everything else I worry about as an academic writing instructor, software developer, fan of various arts, and, well, as a human) is AI-generated arts criticism.

church sign, ominously: DAYS ARE SHORTER, DARKNESS IS LONGER, ARE YOU READY?
me, in a fuzzy sweater, drinking apple cider, on way to pumpkin patch, missing point entirely: ABSOLUTELY, LET'S GO

the fae: come with us, human
me: um, you're the fae right?
fae: yeah?
me: this doesn't usually end happily for humans, does it?
fae: no?
me: okay, but do you have generative ai?
fae: what?
me: llms? chatgpt? that sort of thing?
fae: no?
me: can I wear a cloak? a velvet one?
fae: yeah?
me: WE RIDE

I've been there enough now to know that Wyoming actually borders MT, ID, UT, CO, NE, and SD, but it still >feels< like WY also borders North Dakota, Kansas, Oregon, West Virginia, Manitoba, and, like, Liechtenstein for some reason? Especially after flying over. It's large. It's not Texas, but still

Rabbit because . . . wait, why no rabbit? What happened to the rabbit? I need to know about the lack of rabbit now

Word count primarily, though as I've refined my outlining process, it's more word count to get through 3.5K (or thereabouts) chapter arcs than a set number.

Charging radios this afternoon. Haven't bothered scanning SW bands in quite a while. AM is trashed enough with noise, even strong locals. It's the 24/7 QRM Show around here 🙄

Yeah, I think whatever version plays most nicely with Audacity at this point wins. Everything else seems to work fine.

Um, did AI misunderstand Gen X's relationship to the Oregon Trail or something?

LibreOffice. Very pre-ribbon MS Word feel to it. (I'm old.) I do have a copy of Word for files editors send, but track/accept changes is all I use it for.

resurrecting (mostly) defunct PCs with Puppy Linux, which was fun, but obviously not what I need to replace my work/audio hobby desktop OS with....

Hey, blue sky, what Linux distros do we love? I know the obvious answer here is "go research this yourself," which I will do. I can't unWindows my PC (er, defenestrate?) until the end of the semester, but I'm looking around now. It's just . . . been a while, haha. Most recent #linux project involved

the ability to record weather band directly is actually quite useful to me at the moment, as one of my current writing projects is a series of erasure poems using NOAA All Hazards recordings. (Hmm, if this air band, maybe I'd get back to the ATIS-related poems project too....)

Black Retekess V115P radio on my avocado green couch. The radio is tuned to the weather band at 162.400MHz.

Well, here's the new Retekess V115P. My Retekess V115 still works fine. One of them does, anyway. The other had an . . . incident . . . with the USB charger port and, well, I haven't fixed that yet. Anyway, I bought this because I do actually use the V115 quite a lot to record from other radios and

Shortwave radio poetry special in the works. Will post more soon. And yes, there will be QSL cards for this one

Also, maybe we can equate self-pub in different genres when most poetry presses don't charge $35+ "reading fees"?

Ugh, sorry. Self-pub poetry books seem like a separate case anyway, when the norm is for many if not most individual poems in collections to have been previously published in journals? Which is trad pub?